


This is a future that didn’t happen, except of course that everything happens somewhere (and try the biscuits; they’re good).

by Eva



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-15
Updated: 2010-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:38:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eva/pseuds/Eva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU splinter fic for Night Watch.  Sam Vimes returns to a future in which he had never been born.  Written for xlcatloveress during the Help Chile LJ drive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is a future that didn’t happen, except of course that everything happens somewhere (and try the biscuits; they’re good).

.........

It was over in a minute, and Vimes could have killed him.

“You were supposed to arrest him!” he screamed, wrenching the sword from Carrot’s hands. It stuck in Carcer’s chest--in his ribs, probably--and Vimes left it hanging. “What were you thinking? We were going to hang him! Clean!”

He’d never seen Carrot look quite so blank, or so cold. “Are you a watchman, Mister...?”

The world fell out from under him.

.........

“You said you’d send me home,” Vimes growled, feeling his nails digging so far into his palms he might’ve hit bone.

“You are home,” Sweeper said serenely, and disappeared. At least, he moved very fast, because Vimes’ fist connected with wood instead of his smug little face. “Or, should I say, Sam Vimes is home. He has saved his wife, held his son, and made his arrest.”

In another world, his fist was bleeding, nerves screaming. In yet another, the words “saved,” “son,” and “arrest” were pushing against each other for pride of place. But in this one, everything was blocked out by an unyielding rage.

“Then why am I here?” It was almost a scream.

“Ah.” Sweeper nodded, his eyes distant. “One of the hard ones.”

.........

There were faces he recognized. Cheri, Reg, Flint, even Ping--”a dialect word for watermeadow”--and faces he did not. Faces that belonged to strange men, to women he knew as seamstresses--faces that belonged to vampires. Faces not in his Watch.

“Henry, if you’ll lend this man a uniform,” Carrot said, and another man he didn’t recognize saluted.

“Yes, Captain!”

“Only a captain?” Vimes repeated, under his breath. Carrot heard him anyway.

“After you get dressed, perhaps we could talk in my office,” he said pleasantly, “Sam.”

.........

“I know the Trousers of Time,” Vimes said, holding onto his patience with both hands and all thirty-something teeth. “You choose one way, or another--”

“Or someone else does,” Sweeper interrupted. He took a sip of the tea Vimes had been ignoring. “Someone like your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Fracture time, and you can fracture other dimensions as well,” Sweeper said, shrugging. “It’s all connected. Like a web, or a house of cards.”

“You’re saying I was never born,” Vimes said flatly, and felt a little bit of relief--something simple, thank the gods, except-- “Then how am I here?”

“You’re not, and neither is here,” Sweeper said, and sighed. “Set it up again, Qu, please?”

“He’s really intent on hitting you,” Qu said mildly.

.........

“Starting at corporal,” Carrot said, and Vimes bit back his first response, and then several more.

“Just like that? You don’t want to get my sto--my background checked, anything?” If only he’d bit back that one, too, Vimes thought wearily, closing his eyes. He was tired, that was all; too tired to deal with any of this. He was supposed to be home. He was supposed to be home and dry.

Carrot smiled. There was, somehow, something kind to it. “Yes or no, Mister Vimes?”

.........

“This is a future that didn’t happen, except of course that everything happens somewhere,” Sweeper said, and held out a box. “Try the biscuits; they’re good.”

“No thank you,” Vimes mumbled. They’d left him to scream a while, work out some of his energy, and now he just wanted to sleep--yes, and wake up back home in bed, where he was supposed to be.

“Think of it as a dream, Your Grace. You, Samuel Vimes, are back where you are supposed to be. But you are dreaming you are here, where you are not supposed to be--where you never were, in fact. You’re dreaming. And you will wake up.”

Vimes seized on that. “When?”

Sweeper rubbed his face. “You already did.”

“But--”

“This is the dream, Mister Vimes! For as long as you are in it, you are in it. You’ll dream a whole life here. But you’ll already be back home--you already are back home, all right? This is a dream. Anything that happens here; it’s all a dream. You can make it a bad one or a good one. And you won’t remember anything when you wake up.”

.........

Seeing the statue was like being punched in the stomach, and Vimes knew more than a little about being punched.

“Lady Sybil Ramkin, standing up to the dragon,” Carrot said easily, looking up with the same honest, open expression that had charmed an entire city--the one that never failed to get Vimes’ hackles up. “A true heroine.”

“Did she--” Vimes swallowed. The question stuck in his throat like one of Dibbler’s sausages. “Did she die?”

“No, but she did rather lose faith in her fellow citizens,” Carrot said. “She lives in Quirm now, and is doing quite well. Still keeping dragons, I understand.”

“Keeping tabs on her?” At some point, his throat would open back up, and he would speak normally again, Vimes knew.

“Lady Sybil is kind enough to write every Hogswatch.”

Of course she was. Vimes closed his eyes.

.........  
 _  
“That isn’t how it works at all, Lu-Tze!” wailed Qu._

“No,” said Sweeper, “but it’s a bloody good lie.”

.........

Vimes remembered when it was strange to see Cheri--sorry, Cheery--with high-heeled boots and mascara. Now...

“So if you can find out what exactly is in it, you can make a reasonable guess as to where it came from,” she--no, he, he--said.

But it was like a hidden picture: once you knew where the spoon and the three bananas were, you couldn’t unsee them. “So you can track this batch of Slab back to...?”

“The manufacturers, sir,” she said, smiling a bit. “Then you can set up the sting.”

“Ah, yes. The sting.” And the vocabulary! Who came up with this stuff? Why not just ‘you can catch the bastards?’

Then something on her worktable started to bubble, and they both dived underneath.

.........

He knew Carrot was keeping an eye on him. Starting him at corporal? Was the man crazy? Except...

Carrot could always read a person, front to back, just by looking him in the face. And Vimes had never been tricky enough to be anything but straight as an arrow. Maybe Carrot wasn’t taking such a risk, after all.

Except that he bloody well was! Reading a person well or not, you do not make a stranger a corporal! Especially not... when you were watching him... waiting for him to slip up...

Vimes gritted his teeth, and caught Flint’s eye. “Ready, Constable?”

It wasn’t proving himself. He didn’t have to prove himself to Carrot.

Things were different in more ways than the just the obvious.

.........

“He’d already killed an officer,” Carrot said simply. His hands rested behind his back, and he stared out the window over the city. His city. Not Vimes’. Not here.

“I have to protect the people, Corporal. And Mister Carcer was a danger to everyone, even to our more specially trained members of the Watch.”

“People like him should swing,” Vimes said flatly. “Sir.”

He hated saying that word, in this office.

Carrot turned abruptly, and it hurt, in a way, to see how like Vetinari he was in that moment. Carrot held authority in the exact same way: without bowing, without bending; without showing that he was just a man. “Sometimes it comes down to a moment, Corporal. It is well within the law for an officer to defend himself.”

You didn’t need to, Vimes thought, but very carefully did not say. You, of all people, could have done it another way. The right way.

And I needed Carcer to swing.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and took some pleasure in seeing the way Carrot’s expression went a bit more blank. He’d definitely heard the curse Vimes definitely hadn’t spoken.

.........

His fellow officers would have stood him drinks all night, if Vimes had let them. But he sat nursing a lemonade while the beer flowed all around him, and sometimes onto his shoe.

“Congratulations, Sergeant,” Enmitilda said, and slapped him on the back. Her teeth gleamed in the low light.

Vimes very carefully did not flinch. “Thank you, Constable.”

“You’re sure I can’t get you something other than--”

“The lemonade is fine,” Vimes said, more sharply than he’d intended, but to his surprise Enmitilda just smiled.

“I understand, sir,” she said, and tapped the black ribbon pinned against a pink patch on her chest. “If you need someone to talk with, you know, someone who understands...?”

“That’s very kind of you, Constable,” Carrot said, and Vimes jerked, lemonade spilling over his fingers. “Would you mind getting a napkin for the sergeant?”

It was like a flash of steel, or it would have been, had Carrot been more... more like Carrot, in fact. More amiable than controlled. More innocent than cynical.

At least, on the outside.

“Captain,” he said, unable to keep all the sourness out of his voice.

“Sergeant,” and will wonders never cease; Carrot actually hesitated. Not that the old Carrot wouldn’t have done so, but this one was like a wall. “Would you like to see your new office?”

Well, a wall with a bit of a flush, apparently.

.........

“We did have a werewolf in the Watch.” Carrot paused, his jaw tightening just a little, so little that a person might not have noticed, if he hadn’t been watching so carefully for it. “Sergeant Angua von Uberwald.”

Vimes kept his voice low and easy, but not easy enough to give himself away. “What happened to her?”

The moment was gone. Carrot was blank as ever. “Family business, I understand. She went back to Uberwald. It was a shame; she was truly an excellent officer. But personal business is important.”

You never believed that, you bastard. And you still don’t.

What kind of world was this, that Carrot never learned to put anyone, not even Angua, above his job?

.........

“Whatever happened to the sword? To protecting the people? To defending yourself?” Vimes ranted, more to himself than Carrot, whose head might well be split in two. Vimes couldn’t tell. Weren’t head wounds supposed to bleed a lot? So maybe this wasn’t as bad as it looked?

His shirt--the only bandage at hand, unless he stripped Carrot of his own--had been a rather grimy gray, at one point.

Carrot’s eyes didn’t open, but he said, “I thought I should do it another way.” His voice was weaker than Vimes would’ve liked.

“Another way.”

“The right way.”

Did he read minds, now? “Fine. Great. But you don’t imitate the blasted Marquis of Fantailler!”

And, damn the man, he was smiling.

.........

Of all the things Vimes had expected, up to and including going entirely mad and jumping from the Tower of Art, he hadn’t expected, well, to grieve.

For Sybil.

She was alive, and she was well. And who knew? Maybe she’d married. Maybe she’d found some man in Quirm who wasn’t away at all hours, who sat down to more dinners than he ran from; maybe she’d found a man who could stay with her more nights than he had to leave.

No, chose to leave. He could have stayed. He could have learned to delegate.

He could have had more memories of quiet afternoons, of sweet, warm nights, when her presence had filled up the spaces of his soul and let him be himself, Sam, without apology or regret.

He had lost his wife. His whole, healthy, perfectly happy wife. Who never was his wife. Who never knew him.

He filled the lonely hours with work, because what else was there?

.........

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.” Automatic, and Vimes shifted his gaze to just over the Patrician’s head, to the left.

Vetinari steepled his fingers, and there was a twisted pleasure in knowing how the old bastard would act, when Vetinari couldn’t possibly know anything about him.

“I think, perhaps,” he paused, and there was a lightning flicker of a smile, “the Watch may have greater need of your talents. Particularly in light of Captain Ironfoundersson’s latest mishap.”

Or perhaps he did know, somehow, because Vetinari could still get under his skin with little more than a word.

There was no surprise in Carrot’s face when Vetinari called him in, and announced that the Watch would have two captains. In fact, he looked... pleased?

“Captain Carrot, of course, will be senior and responsible for the final word until you have worked out your own unique system,” Vetinari said, and Vimes knew, knew, that this had not been his idea.

.........

“It’s working out, if you don’t mind my saying so, Captain,” Sergeant Rocksmasher said. “We like to see the captain taking a day off--er, that is, Captain Carrot. Er.”

Visiting bread museums, troll dance groups, and new mining equipment demonstrations. Vimes could believe it, yes, but he couldn’t quite believe that Carrot hadn’t been doing these things before. Didn’t he live for that stuff?

“I mean, we all like to think that we can take the hat off at the end of the day, or night, or, or shift. Er. But the captain--Captain Carrot--he never did. Always on the clock, sir.”

If he ever woke up, if he ever remembered anything, he wanted to remember Simmer Rocksmasher. He hadn’t known there was such a thing as a gossipy dwarf.

“Anyway, he seems happier, sir. And a happy captain makes for a happy Watch, am I right? Sir?”

“I guess it depends on what makes the captain happy.” Vimes puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

.........

“Who’s daft idea was this?” Vimes growled.

“Yours, sir.”

“Thank you for that, Corporal.”

“No problem, sir.” Enmitilda looked down again. “The river’s rising, sir. Should we swim for it?”

“I thought vampires couldn’t cross running water?”

“Not much of it is water, sir.”

Vimes stared at the sludge. It would slop up over the side soon, and that would be the end of these boots.

“You can go bat, can’t you? Get out of here and get help?”

Enmitilda’s face went a bit red. “I could swim for help, sir. But I don’t think I’d be fast enough.”

“You can’t go bat?” Vimes pressed.

Make that very red. “Never managed bats, sir.”

“What did you manage?”

Red enough that she almost glowed. “Butterflies, sir.”

“Butterflies?”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let it get around, sir.”

Butterflies. Vimes coughed. “Well, if we survive this, I can promise it won’t get let around by me.”

“Just keep your head above water, sir, and try not to breathe.”

.........

It was the second time he’d ended up in the Watch house in the nuddy (the first time that his clothes had melted right off him, though), and the second time Carrot had stared at him with that indecipherable expression.

Only this time, he’d followed Vimes to continue staring at him in the shower.

“Do you mind?” Vimes asked, working up as much of a lather as he could before the soap melted.

“There’s no reason for you to be chasing people into the sewers, Sam,” Carrot said, and all the hairs on the back of Vimes’ neck stood up.

“Thank you very much for that; I’ll remember it the next time I’m in the sewers,” he managed, and finally Carrot sighed and moved away.

It was his tone: harried wife. And he knew it from Sybil. Carrot’s voice, Sybil’s tone.

.........

It hadn’t seemed strange to accept an invitation from Carrot to see a few of the city’s sights. After all, Vimes had done that plenty of times, back home (he still didn’t know exactly why), and had the silt samples and backward-spiraled novelty screws to prove it.

But that was back home. And he didn’t remember Carrot ever putting his hand on his, Vimes’, shoulder to steer him around some hopeful buskers who hadn’t yet been noticed by the Guild of Musicians.

“Sam?”

And he’d never called Vimes by his first name. “Carrot.”

It was strange to see the man’s ears constantly turning red. “Er. Should we stop for a meal? Are you hungry?”

He ran a clean city; cleaner maybe than Vimes’. Well, not always, but there wasn’t anything happening tonight. Or on any night that Carrot had taken off, especially those nights when Vimes had, too.

“Not Gimlet’s again.”

Carrot smiled. “Sure, Sam.”

.........

It was the smiling. Carrot never smiled--no, that was wrong. Carrot never smiled at him. Carrot smiled at old ladies, at young ladies who swooned at the sight, at thieves who put down someone else’s worldly goods and at the general citizenry who would never smile back, not to anyone daft enough to smile at them, except of course for Carrot.

But Vimes had been the subject of tactful pauses, worried side-looks, and helpful criticism played out in the most innocent of ways. Never smiles.

He should’ve stopped going out. But he was beginning to crave those restful moments, days dulled into serenity by exclamations over fifty year-old bagels and musings over the merits of ketchup versus chili on a rat (Vimes had no opinion. And he wouldn’t until there were bacon-wrapped rats).

He should’ve stopped it. But there minutes, maybe even entire hours here and there, when he didn’t feel anything but ease when Carrot called him “Sam.”

.........

His heart pounded in his eardrums, which was better than not pounding out all, by reason of being shot out of his chest.

The gonne! So Edward d’Eath never got it, never had reason to; that didn’t mean someone else couldn’t have gotten it. And someone else did.

“Captain! He’s gone out the back!” And who was that? Lance-Constable Worthy-Are-the-Bright-of-Spirit, waving a crossbow like a holy relic. “Captain? Are you hurt?”

“Not at all,” he managed. Nothing but shaken nerves, and a shattered window not an inch to his left. Carrot would be vexed.

But that wasn’t important. Vimes forced himself upright, away from the wall, and gave chase.

.........

He’d watched Carrot run Cruces through, once. And he’d watched him do the same to Carcer. He knew Carrot knew how to do it.

So why was Francis “Pennies” Markham being led away by three officers, while Carrot lay bleeding on the floor?

“Don’t touch it,” he’d ordered earlier, “don’t even put a finger on it.” And so the gonne was left, lying there, for Vimes to deal with.

He did. No voice could get through the thoughts clamoring in Vimes’ brain like funeral bells--not funeral, not funeral! He smashed it, viciously, again and again, and took the bits to be melted down at a smith’s while Igor worked on Carrot.

He’d survived. Four months, two promotions, one dream in place of one life. And somehow, the dream had become a life. He’d survived. He’d lived. He’d almost figured out how to thrive.

He wasn’t Commander Vimes here. He was just a captain. Just one of two.

He didn’t want to be just one.

.........

He was sitting in the hall, holding his helmet in his hands, when Igor peered out of the door. “Captain?”

Vimes stood straight and tall, as if he were in front of the Patrician, or going to his own execution.

“Captain Carrot asked for you.” And just like that, Igor was gone. The door remained open, just a bit.

Carrot’s eyes were closed, and his face was as pale as the bandage around his chest. It was perfectly white and clean. Vimes couldn’t imagine how it could be. That had been one hell of a hole.

He sat down again, on the chair left next to the bed.

“Sam?”

Nothing could ever sound as sweet as that broken whisper. Unable to find words, Vimes half-stood, leaning close before he knew what he planned to do.

One dry, feather-light press of a kiss later, Carrot smiled.

.........

What else was there?

A dream, or a life?

.........

the end

**Author's Note:**

> Of course nothing is mine, except possibly Enmitilda, Rocksmasher, and Worthy-Are-the-Bright-of-Spirit, who couldn’t possibly exist without the Disc, so they’re almost certainly borrowed from another universe where other things happened. Right? I don’t actually know how this works. But I’d love to be able to transform into a bunch of butterflies. The bit in italics is quoted directly from Night Watch, for truth. And the idea of everything happening somewhere--well, that doesn’t necessarily belong to Sir Pratchett, but he definitely talks about it in Lords and Ladies. If Esme/Ridcully could happen somewhere, then why not Carrot/Vimes?


End file.
